Free Republic

After a Sept. 4 school shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia left 4 dead and 9 wounded at the hands of a 14-year-old, gun violence and solutions to school shootings surged once again to the top of national conversation.Colt Gray, who was investigated for posting online threats of a school shooting last year, has been charged with four counts of murder in the case. His father Colin is also facing charges of involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder for allowing his child to have a weapon. >Only recently have parents of school shooters been held responsible for their children’s...

Mary Payne always liked the idea of a one-room schoolhouse. She grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series and appreciated the concept of various ages learning together and a more practical, hands-on approach to education. More so, she and her husband Michael weren’t thrilled with their experience with public schools back home in Illinois and had been looking for alternatives for their 5-year-old son after moving to Wyoming. When they heard about something called a microschool in Campbell County, Homestead Learning, they decided to check it out. The couple liked what they saw and decided...

What do you think of these questions given to seventh-grade students at the Middle Village Prep Charter School in Queens County, New York? These are questions they were told to ask one another. And they were asked to write about them. "5. On an airplane, you are talking pleasantly to a person of average appearance. Unexpectedly, the person offers you $10,000 for one night of sex. Knowing there is no danger and that payment is certain, would you accept the offer? 14. What are your feelings about killing a handicapped child at birth? 19. What has been the worst sexual...

Recently I was served a TikTok showing a mom taking her daughters out for ice cream. While we watch the girls enjoy their treats, the mom’s voiceover describes how their homeschool curriculum is preparing them for a life of financial independence. From early childhood, these girls are learning to invest. They are learning about stocks, about compound interest. They are training to be self-made millionaires, the mom proudly concludes, and anyone can do this while homeschooling your kids. Homeschooling is hot right now. Last year the Washington Post reported that homeschooling has increased by over 50 percent since 2017, making...

Happy Friday friends! Thanks again to all of you that were able to join us for our livestream on Tuesday. If you weren't able to join us, we announced the big news about our upcoming performances at Dollywood and we debuted our first original song! This was a song Colt wrote back in 2009 with his then drummer and my Uncle Josh. They recorded this song along with a full-length original album together. At that time, Colt and I had only been married a couple years and we had no idea that one day we'd have children that would love...

The number of children being educated at home has been growing for the past few decades. No one knows by how much, and that is part of the problem. Home­school­ing is barely tracked or regulated in the U.S. But children deserve a safe and robust education, whether they attend a traditional school or are educated at home.The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that by last count, in 2019, nearly 3 percent of U.S. children—1.5 million—were being home­schooled. This number, calculated from a nationwide survey, is surely an undercount because the home­schooling population is notoriously hard to survey, and...

For almost 400 years America has seen its citizens educating their children and themselves, though both the scope, structure and quality of education has changed somewhat during that time. For much of the history of the United States, education of children took place primarily at home, often along with private schools for some, and locally managed and supported schools for others. Education included the general ethos of Christianity and Biblical morality as well as academic subjects. The New England Primer and later, the nation-wide McGuffey's Readers (120+ million copies) were the primary instruments of education, and in helping to form...

Reading for fun sharply declines around age nine in an alarming trend that coincides with years of learning loss since the pandemic, data shows. Only 35% of nine-year-olds are reading at least five days a week compared to 57% of eight-year-olds, according to the latest Scholastic survey on the issue. “The number of kids who say they love reading drops significantly from 40% among eight-year-olds to 28% among nine-year-olds,” the Scholastic report notes. The trend, dubbed the “decline by nine” has concerned researchers, who note that reaching reading proficiency by third grade is a good predictor of academic success. [snip]...

If the Biden administration is trying to restore American parents’ confidence in the public school system, they sure have a funny way of showing it. Nowadays, one of the most significant causes of concern — and perhaps the deciding factor for most parents pulling their children out of public schools — has been the increasing woke indoctrination from the public school system, especially in regard to the ever-prominent LGBT agenda. And how is Biden’s Department of Education handling the increasing wariness of parents toward the public school system? By releasing on social media a video celebrating another made-up LGBT holiday,...

On a spring night in 2022, Ross Hill was trying to get several of his children—he has eight—tucked into bed for the night. *** “They were in tears because they didn’t want to go to school the next day,” said Mr. Hill, a 38-year-old teacher from Florence, South Carolina (pop: 39,958). Whether he knew it at the time or not, Mr. Hill’s family was part of a trend in the United States. A surprising number of children are miserable at school, research shows, and it’s a trend that began before the pandemic. For example, a 2020 Yale study that surveyed...

A New York University professor claimed last week homeschooled students can easily become victims of indoctrination.During an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) book club meeting, Ruth Ben-Ghiat argued the recent opposition against public schooling stems originates with authoritarians who want to indoctrinate their children via homeschooling.One of the reasons that they all go after education and one of the reasons that schools are being targeted ... A big thing is to destroy liberal, democratic models of secular education – get everybody out of the system, put them in homeschools so they can be indoctrinated,” Ben-Ghiat told AFT President Randi Weingarten,...

That mean old clock on the wall doesn't tend to be particularly kind to leaders and entrepreneurs, so big surprise, companies that offer cliffs notes, abridged or otherwise easy-to-digest versions of books are soaring in popularity. These certainly aren't all bad, since they can help you quickly understand what the main point of a text is or let you jog your memory about it. They have their place. But if you're going to read a book, please just read the real, whole book already, at least most of the time. There are valuable reasons not to skip even one...

Feeling Unqualified to Homeschool? 8 Resources to Get StartedIf you’re feeling unqualified to homeschool, you’re not alone. The question of what and how to teach stressed me out early on in my homeschooling journey.I found that having a good curriculum did a great deal to reduce my fears of not being qualified to teach. I wanted to strike a balance between bookwork, memorization, and fun interactive activities. I wanted to make sure to impart to my kids the basic body of knowledge necessary for a good education, yet I didn’t want to burn them out with endless worksheets.Still, the world...

Leftist indoctrination is too difficult when parents educate their own children. Is the U.S. legal system even guided by the rule of law anymore? More and more, we are seeing stories that the agencies like the FBI, IRS, and Department of Justice have been weaponized against conservatives. Liberal prosecutors and district attorneys are no longer even pretending to be unbiased. Now, public schools have been a bastion for liberal indoctrination for far too long. Our students don’t learn how to read, multiply, or even think, but they can tell you about climate change, transgenderism, and abortion in great detail, even...

North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt lost Tuesday's Republican primary to Michele Morrow, a home-schooling parent critical of public schools' "radical agendas" on race and gender ideology. Morrow, a nurse and former Christian missionary who ran unsuccessfully for the Wake County school board in 2022, garnered 52% of the vote Tuesday, while the incumbent Truitt tallied 48%, WTVD reported. The Super Tuesday upset came despite Truitt's sizable fundraising advantages and GOP establishment support. Morrow, a supporter of former President Donald Trump who accused Truitt of not being conservative enough, collected backing from rural education leaders and will now...

In the face of declining enrollment and projected budget shortfalls, the Fort Worth Independent School District plans to cut staff. Superintendent Angelica Ramsey posted the announcement online Monday. "This year, due to continued projections of declining enrollment, coupled with legislative inaction on public school financing, the sunsetting of ESSER funds, fewer federal dollars, and a projected budget deficit, it has become necessary for us to make additional reductions both in budgets and staff," Ramsey wrote. School board members spent three hours in executive session during a special meeting on Tuesday night, discussing which positions and how many will be affected....

Michigan officials are calling upon state lawmakers to enact a mandatory state registry of all homeschooled children in Michigan. Since December 2023, Michigan state officials — including Attorney General Dana Nessel, the state House and Senate Education Committee chairs, the State Board of Education, and State Superintendent Michael Rice — have criticized homeschooling and called for stricter government regulation and oversight over homeschooled students and their parents. The motivation for these attacks was the arrest in December of two couples in Clinton County for “allegedly abusing and financially profiting from foster and adopted children.” However, instead of focusing on the...

CV NEWS FEED // A widowed single father filed suit against a New Jersey school district that he alleges “transitioned” his minor daughter behind his back. The young girl had attended Delaware Valley Regional High School (DVRHS) located in the west-central part of the state by the Pennsylvania border. The anonymous father claimed the school “had been calling his daughter by a male name and male pronouns for at least two months,” as reported by The Washington Stand. Per the Stand, school officials began treating the girl as a boy “after a pro-LGBT student club’s staff advisor … asked teachers...

A pitfall of the fallen human mind is how narratives shape our perception of the world, even outweighing facts and common sense. For example, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to generate electricity. According to the Our World in Data report, nuclear is 99.8% safer than coal in terms of deaths per unit of power. Yet because of three dramatic accidents and the press surrounding them — Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011 — nuclear power is widely perceived as extraordinarily dangerous and in need of claustrophobic regulation. Similarly, a narrative pushed...

Across the country, people found alternatives in home schooling, private schools and charter schools.